The invention relates to various fields wherein professionals, hobbyists, craftsmen, dilettantes, artists, and workers are engaged in activities involving hand-held tools and implements that are so numerous as to clutter an area and become an imposition with regard to organizing, maintaining, and cleaning the tools and implements.
For example, busy chefs, outdoor grilling aficionados, and midnight snackers prepare, chop, spice, and garnish foods for flavor and appeal using such implements as cleaning brushes, cutting boards, peelers, and zesters. Even the preparation of a simple salad of greens and carrot pennies can partially fill a sink with implements and tools requiring cleaning. Many are all too familiar with the awkward juggling of items that typically occurs on camping trips and tailgate parties where foods are prepared in the absence of clean and stable kitchen-counter surfaces. Shortcuts to avoid carrying and cleaning a host of articles are often preferred despite risks such shortcuts represent.
In one often seen example, a hurried homemaker cuts a vegetable utilizing only a knife and unprotected hands. In another, a do-it-yourself electrician trims insulation from the end of an electrical wire by rolling the wire between a thumb and a sharp blade. It seems that in many fields of endeavor, people seeking conveniences are subjecting themselves to unnecessary risks.
Some devices are known which protect a hand. One such device is disclosed, for example, in Burtoff U.S. Pat. No. 3,164,841, and consists of a glove that covers the entire hand and that includes, between inner and outer layers of the glove, a series of protective rings. When worn, the protective wrings are disposed adjacent the inter-jointal areas of the digits and are rather inflexible. These rings protect the digits from injury resulting from blows to the hand and compression of the hand.
Even in view of the known devices which protect a hand, it is believed that needs exist for still yet improved devices for protecting the hand, especially during cutting operations. Such need is addressed by one or more embodiments of the invention.